Musical scores have been used for centuries for representing musical pieces. Traditionally printed on paper, such scores are sometimes referred to as sheet music, with each page of a musical score capturing the notes, rhythm, and sequence of how the musical piece is to be performed. One particularly challenging aspect of performing or practicing with sheet music is the need to physically turn the pages in order to continue with musical scores that extend beyond one page. The act of turning pages interrupts the playing of the instrument and can cause the practice session or performance to suffer. Oftentimes, professionals employ assistants whose job it is to physically turn the music sheets so that the musician can focus on playing. This can be critical for a musician whose instrument is the piano or the violin, where both hands are needed to play the instrument.
Rather than employing assistants, mechanical means to turn pages can be used and U.S. Pat. No. 7,238,872 discloses a mechanical system for automatically turning pages of musical scores. While such a machine can usefully address the simple act of turning pages, musical scores may not be linear entities and may require the musician to move within the score in nonlinear ways.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,760,323 describes an electronic music stand that displays a digital score that can be scrolled via a foot pedal, sound recognition, or a timing mechanism. However, the scrolling is limited to paging forward or backwards, which results in a potential need for repeated scrolling if the musical piece requires the musician to jump forward or backwards by several pages. Without the tactile feedback of physical pages, such repetitive scrolling may result in overshooting the page and a need to reverse the scrolling, thereby disrupting a performance by even a greater amount than the intended goal of saving the musician time and distractions.
Specifically, musical pieces often repeat sections but the physical repetition of such sections in a score can be expensive to create—especially when scores are transcribed by hand—and result in literally heavy burdens for the musicians to carry as well as be wasteful of paper. Consequently, notational shorthand has been created to instruct the musician when a section needs to be repeated, saving on the need to redundantly reproduce the exact same sections multiple times. However, this creates a situation where, unlike a book that the reader simply turns to the next page to continue reading, a musician may need to go back a page when progressing in a musical piece or even jump forward several pages within a score in order to skip over parts that are not included in the repetition. Such nonlinear turning of pages makes the mechanical act of page turning even more disruptive. With the introduction of digital storage media, the possibility of nonlinear traversal without physical overhead became possible.
U.S. Pat. No. 8,431,809 describes an electronic music display that allows the musician to define the points at which a musical score continues on another page that may be earlier in the score.
The system renders visual cues on the digital page to indicate where page turns will occur and additional visual cues indicate where the page will go to when it is turned. However, the system requires manual entry of the repetitions and requires a timer that calculates when a page turn will occur. To have to manually define all the nonlinear jumps in a score before using such a system could be a tedious task and the visual indicators may be distracting. Furthermore, having a timer can be difficult for musicians who are still becoming familiar with the score and need to practice without adhering to a preset timing for progressing through the musical piece.
U.S. Patent 2011/0203442 discloses an electronic display of sheet music that is capable of jumping from one portion of a score to another. The system assumes the existence of sub-module that would require manual intervention to alter, the flow of the music in order to conform to the intent of the musical score. Such manual intervention is costly in terms of time and labor.
In general, systems for electronic display of musical scores are based upon the fundamental unit of the original physical musical page of the sheet music. For example, U.S. Patent 2001/0037719 discloses a system for displaying music sheet where a musician can manually program the flow of the music but the system is based upon the fundamental unit of a page within the score. As well, in U.S. Patent 2008/0092723, a hands-free system for traversing musical scores is based upon the fundamental unit of a page within the score.
While basing the display of musical scores on a fundamental unit of a single page within the score is sensible, it can also be suboptimal for the musician. Specifically, when the correct page has been found, the musician has to know where to look in order since the point where the piece continues may not be at the top of the page but somewhere in the middle of the page. This need to search for the correct position to focus on adds an additional cognitive task for the musician and, taken together, the traversal of a musical score can be far more challenging than the traversal of a standard book which is generally in a linear fashion. With respect to musical scores, there is a need for an understanding of the structure of the musical score in order to traverse the score as intended.
In U.S. Patent 2006/0048632, the musical score is broken down into atomic units, each unit comprising of at least one musical note, which are then displayed in a browser. While such a system may be suitable associating audio components to a score and for providing a musician with minute control over the elements of a musical piece, it does not address the issues relating to the traversal of a piece of music that may potentially be nonlinear due to repetitions within the piece.
In U.S. Pat. No. 8,442,325, a method for recognizing musical score images is disclosed whereby the lines of a musical staff is detected and separated from the notes. The disclosed method is used for generating a sound corresponding to the musical notes, and does not use the understood components of the musical score to sequence the musical components in order to aid a musician in traversing the score.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,400,687 describes a musical score display that can accommodate the basic elements of a musical score, including repeat instructions such as Da Capo, Dal Segno, Al Fine, and other constructs. However, the system is based upon musical data that need to be created specifically for the pieces of music being displayed. Thus, the described system does not have the ability to take advantage of the huge corpus of existing musical scores, such as classical pieces by Beethoven, unless the laborious work of converting standard music notation to the needed musical data format is undertaken manually.
U.S. Pat. No. 8,530,735 describes a system that replaces displayed portions of a musical piece with subsequent portions of the same musical piece so that the display is synchronized with a performer. The system is well suited for performers, such as singers in a karaoke setting where the performer needs to follow some existing musical guide. However, the system is not based upon standard musical scores and so has no concept of musical structure represented in the sheet music format preferred by classical musicians. It is therefore unable to take advantage of existing musical scores but will need to have some system of converting existing scores to an internal format.
It can be seen that there is a need for a system and method to display traditional paper-based musical scores using an electronic device. It can also be seen that there is a need for a system to allow page turning in a manner that conforms to the progression of the musical piece while minimizing the possibility of turning to the wrong page. Furthermore, it can be seen that there is a need for a system that presents the established visual format of musical scores but is freed from the limits of being constrained to music sheet pages which require cognitive effort by the musician to find the continuation point when a jump within the musical score is made. Finally, it can be seen that it would be advantageous for such a system and method to take advantage of the large corpus of existing musical score by automating the ingestion of the scores so that the musicians will not need to manually enter data for each score they desire to use.